Product Description

A man traveling through a Western town is mistaken for a hit man who the local sheriff has hired to kill his wife.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 10-AUG-1999
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16702 in DVD
• Brand: CAGE,N/HOPPER,D
• Released on: 1999-08-10
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
With Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, writer-director John Dahl established himself as America's leading maker of tough, twisted, funny little neo-noir pictures. Red Rock West is a spare, tight reworking of noirish motifs--the lone man caught in a web of circumstance and betrayal, the rich femme fatale, the corrupt policeman, the wounded military veteran, the homicidal psychopath--that brings to mind classics from Detour to Out of the Past to Bad Day at Black Rock. Cage--warming up for his career-peak (so far) performance in Leaving Las Vegas a few years later--plays an unemployed former Marine (his leg injured in the truck-bombing of the base in Beirut) who stumbles into a nightmarish situation when he stops at a bar in the isolated Wyoming town of Red Rock West. With one fateful step, he's trapped; and no matter how hard he tries, he just can't seem to leave town. The late J.T. Walsh is (as always) splendidly corrupt as the bar owner who harbors some deadly secrets, and Dennis Hopper does a variation on his patented Blue Velvet/River's Edge psycho that suits the treacherous environs of Red Rock West just fine. --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

Gripping modern "film noir" thriller definitely worth seeing
"Red Rock West" is a superb and amazingly well written thriller with excellent acting and surprises galore. The plot twists and turns and keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout.

Nicolas Cage plays Michael Williams who arrives in Red Rock broke and out of work when he is mistaken for a contract killer. Bar owner Wayne Brown (J. T. Walsh) offers him $10,000 to murder his wife. Williams is shocked but pretends to go along with the plan. He decides to warn Brown's wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle) of her husband's intentions but this is where things start to go drastically wrong. The real killer, Lyle (played by Dennis Hopper) then arrives in town which places Williams in many dangerous situations so you will just have to see the film to find out what happens to him next!!

Some favourite lines from the film:

Nicolas Cage (to Lara Flynn Boyle): "I hate to see an innocent woman get hurt but it's an awful lot of money".

Boyle (to Cage): "O.K. How are you going to explain impersonating a hired killer and taking $10,000 from my husband?".

"Red Rock West" is a film that did not receive much publicity on its release but is now gaining a cult following. This is definitely a film worth looking out for with a marvellous storyline and many unexpected surprises along the way.

J.T. Walsh gave a riveting performance in the film - he was a fine actor and it is tragic that we lost him to a fatal heart attack in 1998. He had become one of my favourite actors in films such as "Breakdown", "The Narrow Margin", "A Few Good Men", "The Client" and many others. He usually played character parts or supporting roles but was always watchable. A sad loss.

"Red Rock West" was co-written and directed by John Dahl - a name I was not familiar with - but I did enjoy another film of his recently called "The Last Seduction". I will watch out for more of his films in the future. "Red Rock" is certainly a surprise hit - one of the best thrillers of the 90's. Do yourself a favour and see it! Clive Roberts.

Just GO, man!
I've watched this marvelous noir movie, oh, maybe 4 times, and my response is always the same. Nicholas Cage has yet another opportunity to just get the hell our of Red Rock, and you can see the conflict and indecision and inevitability play across his face, and you just want to shout at him, `GO, man, just GO!'
But of course, if he did, there wouldn't be a movie, and it's such a good one that it would really be a shame to have it not exist.
Cage plays a down and out ex-Marine who literally stumbles into Red Rock West, Wyoming. For his sake, you wish it could have been maybe Red Rock East, or Laramie, or Cheyenne - anyplace other than Red Rock West...but no. It's in Red Rock West that he finds himself caught in a web of betrayal that begins with a case of mistaken identity and goes from silly to confusing to scary to terrifying in the space of about 20 minutes. There's a femme fatale, a psychopath (spectacularly played by Dennis Hooper), money, power, treachery, and ruthlessness at play here. Cage is trapped but good, and no matter how hard he tried, he just can't seem to leave town.
Bravo, bravo.

Dahl's Trilogy - part two
One of the three Dahl's "film noir" / "road movie" and possibly the best of all. The other are "Kill Me Again" and "The Last Seduction". In this particular movie, Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper have excellent performances and give life to a brilliant script. Not as brilliant as in "Vampire's Kiss" and not as energic as in Lynch's "Wild At Heart", Nicolas Cage has, even though, a great performance as a naive and pure soul and Cage's character comes to be the only who makes his way out of the plot. A lesson of life? Dennis Hopper shows us that even after being on the road as an "Easy Rider" and playing the dark and mysterious "Blue Velvet"'s character, he is still on the run. As in the other two movies which complete Dahl's trilogy, there is a "femme fatale", a certain amount of money, there are men in whom she is only interested because of the cash and there is an unknown end, different at each one of the three movies.